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Abstract: After the release of the first season of Hulu's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale in April 2017, feminist activists in the US and abroad swiftly adopted handmaid costumes to protest various policies and politicians. In this essay, I argue that the handmaid protest costume has functioned as a form of what I term "feminist dystopian protest rhetoric" by drawing on images of an iconic feminist dystopian future to advocate for a better world today. The handmaid protest costume embodies the complex interplay between utopia and dystopia that has been unfolding in recent years, utilizing a now iconic feminist dystopian image to condemn oppression and injustice, reflect a belief that contemporary wrongs can be overcome and foreground oppositional voices and subjectivities even under the most oppressive systems, all without the formulation of a unitary utopian agenda. I discuss key elements of the costume's success, including its spreadability, iconicity, coherent visual identity and impact, before outlining its connection to defamiliarization, a common feature of dystopian works. Lastly, I consider some of the issues that users of the handmaid protest costume may have to grapple with if the handmaid costume is to continue to be used as a form of protest.
After the release of the first season of Hulu's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in April 2017, feminist activists in the US and abroad swiftly adopted handmaid costumes to protest various policies and politicians. In the intervening years, these protesters have received a lot of media coverage; journalists in a variety of local and national papers have covered various protests, photos and commentary of the protesters have appeared on social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, and figures including Ane Crabtree, the costume designer for the adaptation, and Atwood herself have praised the handmaid protesters in interviews. As handmaid protests proliferated, the handmaid costume functioned as a form of what 1 have termed "feminist dystopian protest rhetoric" by drawing on images of an iconic feminist dystopian future to advocate for a better world today.
The handmaid protest costume embodies the complex interplay between utopia and dystopia that has been unfolding in recent years. As a dystopian novel, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) draws not only on the dystopian genre that has become so...